Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

Time has a way of moving mysteriously, sometimes fleeing like a fugitive, at other times lingering like a stalker. But it is always criminal.

Going home for the holidays to the town I grew up in (Sioux Falls, SD), the house I grew up in, feels as though nothing and everything has changed. The same aged aegean-blue frayed carpeting on the staircase leading to my childhood bedroom is even more frayed, threadbare in some places now; the wooden stairs peek through and creak in all the places I’d try to avoid creaking when I came home after curfew. My parents’ room is still at the top of the stairs, but they no longer get out of bed to see if I’ve been drinking. They are nearly 80, and getting out of bed is hard. And anyway, they know damn well I’ve been drinking. It’s the holidays. 

And yet my high school friends no longer live in the homes they used to live in. Many of their parents, whom I remember fondly in their own right, have moved away, while some have passed away, and the places where we’d gather for what seemed like endless hours to play basketball and video games and talk about girls now belong to someone else. It seems to me that we were always relegated to basements, as far from the adults as possible, but we made the best of them. It’s a reminder, I suppose, that we’re all just passing through. 

Still, those days to me seem like yesterday, and driving around my old city at night, with so few cars out this late, feels as though something has been lost, and some emptiness has taken its place. Maybe it is nostalgia incarnate; not sorrow exactly, but whispers of melancholy on a cold winter’s night. 

A few weeks before Thanksgiving break, I was thinking about how I was looking forward to a little time off to see friends and family. At the time I was busy at work, and so thinking about it in advance, the distance to Thanksgiving seemed a not insignificant hill of time to climb. Then, suddenly, it was here. Then it was gone. Now I’m looking forward to Christmas, but soon I know I’ll be looking back at Christmas, even though right now it seems like it’s moving forward in time pretty slowly.  

Sometimes the future thing I’m thinking about won’t be something I’m looking forward to, but something I’m dreading. I’ll have something coming up, something for work, or something else that’s going to be unpleasant, and so I’ll get a head start on worrying about it weeks in advance. But then, like the things I look forward to, this thing will pass as well, and all the worry with it. 

There’s some perspective to be gained here. When I have a future worry now, it can help to think about past worries, and how they were once future worries but aren’t any longer. So this new worry, this future worry, will of course become a past worry soon enough, and so I think I worry about it a little less. 

If there’s any saving grace to time, it’s that it keeps moving forward, dragging you along with it, the past things getting farther away, the future things getting closer, you always balancing in the present. And then one day you’re the past thing and there’s no more looking forward, but also nothing to worry about, which will be kind of nice. I do wonder what the new people in those basements are up to though.